american-holocaust

ON RACISM AND GENOCIDE 273and resistance to it remained strong among historians, despite Jordan'srich documentation and subtlety of analysis. The form this resistance subsequentlywould take was established by George M. Fredrickson in a highlyinfluential article that appeared only three years after White Over Blackwas published.It is necessary, Fredrickson contended, to distinguish between what hecalled "ideological" racism and "societal" racism. Ideological racism is "theexplicit and rationalized racism that can be discerned in nineteenth- andtwentieth-century thought and ideology" while societal racism can be observedin "one racial group [acting] as if another were inherently inferior. . . despite the fact that such a group may not have developed or preserveda conscious and consistent rationale for its behavior." This "dualdefinition of racism," Fredrickson claimed, made it possible to identify thedifferences between "genuinely racist societies and other inegalitarian societieswhere there may be manifestations of racial prejudice and discriminationbut which nevertheless cannot be described as racist in their basiccharacter." In a given society, according to this logic, as long as somereason other than race can be found to justify and rationalize the degradation-and,presumably, even the enslavement and mass murder--of peoplewho are of a different race from that of their oppressors, that society"is not racist in the full sense of the word," Fredrickson claimed. Moreover,if the discrimination for reasons of color is not consistently and universallyapplied to individual members of what is, in a statistical sense, the sociallyinferior group [and] if some members of this group can, despite their physicalcharacteristics, achieve high status because of such attributes as wealth,education, and aristocratic culture, there. is evidence of the overriding importanceof nonracial status criteria. In such a situation, race becomes only onefactor in determining status, an attribute which can be outweighed or neutralizedby other factors. 11By joining this definitional statement with the same sort of historical dataproduced by those historians who, twenty years earlier, had argued thatAmerican racism was essentially a product of slavery-for example, thatalong with slaves there were free blacks in seventeenth-century Virginia,some of whom enjoyed legal and economic rights-Fredrickson concludedthat "America . . . was not born racist; it became so gradually as theresult of a series of crimes against black humanity that stemmed primarilyfrom selfishness, greed and the pursuit of privilege." 12 This judgment servedto undergird Fredrickson's subsequent work and clearly influenced mostof the other prominent discussions of the subject that would appear in thelater 1970s and 1980s. 13There are, however, some problems with Fredrickson's analysis. The